Saturday, January 14, 2017

Goliath Rockgrinder WIP

This week, I managed to get a lot of work done on my Genestealer cult's Goliath truck. I plumbed for the Rockgrinder variant based solely on the fact that the dozer blade with all the grinding drills on the front is so damn cool. I opted to leave the back of the vehicle exposed so that I could put other crew models on it. I know its not technically how the vehicle is supposed to be built for 40k, but I just really built it for how cool I thought things would look - not for the optimal build in the game.

From the first time I saw the model, I was reminded of the Martian mining
vehicles in the original "Total Recall" movie. Love at first sight.

I assembled the kit in about 4-5 hours - there are a ton of parts and lots of options. I don't think I've built a Games Workshop tank kit in at least a decade - and they've learned a lot in that amount time. I tried to leave certain elements separate as sub-assemblies so that I could get to all the different parts easier. I left the big flame-thrower, the dozer blade, the wheels, the crew and the main chassis all as separate
elements.

The dozer blade was dry brushed with multiple shades of metal, then I painted the
hazard stripes and yellow over top (leaving metal showing). Finally the weathering
was dry brushed on.

The flamethrower was pretty straight forward to do. I glazed purples onto the
front of the weapon to show heat stress on the metal.

Here I've glued the tires on after I laid down the base color and weathering on
the main hull.

I knew I wanted the vehicle to feel old and well-worn, so I really tried to go to town with weathering and chipping. The gene stealer neophyte color scheme I'd chosen really felt like Rebel flight crews from Star Wars, so I looked at stills and models of X-Wing fighters from the original trilogy. Once I was ready to paint; my first step, after assembly, was to prime the vehicle black. This was followed by a coat of grey spray and then a pass with white. After that, Everything was blended together by carefully drybrushing the whole thing from grey to white.

I added a lot of rust streaks by thinning down Brown Ink and streaking it on with
a detail brush.

All of the weathering was done with a big, soft dry brush and the chipping was done with a bit of torn foam from blister packs and stippling with a small brush. I was really trying to push the idea of a vehicle that worked in an iron mine - where iron oxide dust and the rust on the vehicle became indistinguishable from each other. This would also help tie the vehicle into my army's orangish color scheme.

Everything put together.

All that's missing is the crew.

I love that back bed. It reminds me of a shitty truck my dad owned when I was a kid.

I still have to do the actual crew - the machine gunner, the flamethrower operator, and a handful of hybrids hanging out on the crew deck. Hopefully that shouldn't take me too much longer. I plan on having that done by next week with any luck!